The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies) Read online

  Elgar was astonished to see the envelope still in his hands. He looked at the fire and wondered if that would not be a better fate for this fearful slip of paper.

  “I know,” whispered Warren, close now to Elgar’s shoulder. “I’ve often thought the same thing myself. Why not just destroy it?”

  “Why not?”

  “It was the Reverend Spurgeon,” said Warren. “He convinced me there was a spiritual, supernatural purpose for these directions. That someday, someone would need to know the way. He told me, ‘When the day of reckoning comes, the day evil is defeated will be the day God’s arm will stretch forth, and in his hand will be his power.’”

  A chill filled Elgar. “What are these? What are these directions?”

  Warren leaned over, took the envelope out of Elgar’s hand, and stuffed it into the inside pocket of Elgar’s jacket. “They lead to the birthplace of man. And to the manifestation of the power of God. Hide them well, my friend.”

  The envelope in his jacket pocket felt as if it were burning a hole in his chest as Elgar traveled home by train to Worcestershire and the town of Great Malvern. He was thoroughly exhausted and at his wit’s end after staying up all night in his London hotel room, working on the cipher. In the carriage from the station, the closer he got to his home, the heavier his burden became. Elgar had no safe at home, no secure place to hide such dangerous information. He recalled hearing someone speak on the advantage of hiding things in plain sight, but his thoughts were as chaotic and random as discordance theory. Nothing made sense.

  Alice was standing on the front steps as the carriage pulled up the drive. He paid the driver, rushed up the steps with his bag in his hand, and barely acknowledged his wife as he hastened inside and went straight to his study. This was the room recently ransacked. What was the chance they would come back to it again? He looked frantically about him as Alice called his name from the doorway. Her steps started down the hall.

  Elgar noticed his box of stationary on top of his desk. Of course. In with the note paper and cards, it would be nearly invisible. Elgar slit the envelope and took the single sheet of paper in his left hand. With his right, he lifted the lid on the stationary box, thumbed through the contents and, as Alice walked into the study, slipped the paper between two pieces of card stock. He would deal with it later.

  “Edward … what is wrong with you? You look as if you’ve stared into the face of death.”

  1

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 28

  5:30 p.m., Jerusalem

  Annie could see that guilt, like a ravenous cancer, consumed more of her husband with every heartbeat. The dead just kept piling up around them—Winthrop and Doc were dead. Now Kallie. Even Annie herself had narrowly escaped the same fate. Tom rubbed at his hands as if the blood would never wash away. Annie feared that the violence torturing Tom Bohannon’s sleep and haunting his days was expanding beyond his capacity to cope.

  Chiseled rays of the late-day sun sporadically pierced the wisteria that twisted over a wooden trellis tucked into the corner of Rabbi Ronald Fineman’s garden in the Nahla’ot section of Jerusalem. A few hours earlier, Annie, Tom, and other friends who held Kallie Nolan dear had endured her memorial service, paying their respects in the land she loved, where she had lost her life, before sending her body back to her family in Iowa. Emotionally spent, the friends were seeking respite from their grief in Rabbi Fineman’s garden. But respite was not on the guest list.

  Annie kept her eyes on Tom as they all struggled to process what they had just been told by Sam Reynolds.

  “But who would try to assassinate the president of the United States and the prime minister of Israel, both on the same night?” Tom asked. The last few months had dropped pounds from Bohannon’s fifty-eight-year-old body—high anxiety and times of near-starvation had taken a severe toll. Now the awful burden of responsibility along with the weight of regret was evident as his six-foot frame hunched over a small table in a corner of the garden. “Who has that kind of power … that kind of reach?”

  Under the trellis, the shade was full. Tom sat across from Annie, holding her hand. Tom’s brother-in-law and sister, Joe and Dierdre Rodriguez, occupied a bench on the far side, Dierdre pressed closely against Rodriguez’s side. In the rear, on a raised, shaded section of stone patio, Rabbi Fineman was engaged in hushed conversation with archaeologist Brandon McDonough.

  “Radical Islam is behind this,” said Reynolds, as he concluded his update. Despite his loose-limbed, Texas-cowboy looks, Reynolds had the sharp mind and dapper dress of a career diplomat with the US State Department. Annie was grateful that Reynolds had quickly become Tom’s friend, ally, and protector over the past several months. “We see the Muslim Brotherhood’s hand at work throughout the Middle East. We can only guess how far ISIS reaches. And your guys with the amulets seem to be involved, too.”

  Annie pulled her hand free from Tom’s and shoved her chair back, a bolt of rage driving her to her feet. “God help us. Aren’t we ever going to be rid of these people?”

  Annie could feel that she’d become a different woman since she and Kallie were kidnapped by the Prophet’s Guard, since Kallie had been murdered and Annie rescued on a dark road near Gaza. Her inner peace, which kept her balanced, had been replaced by a smoldering reservoir of anger that refused to cool. She wanted revenge. “Why can’t you guys wipe out the Prophet’s Guard and give us our lives back?”

  “But—” Reynolds stammered.

  “But nothing,” Annie snapped. “You and the president and all his power have been nothing but bystanders watching from the sidelines as we—as Tom and Joe and Sammy—risked our lives, our families, chasing after the messages on the scroll. We need—”

  A voice from outside the shade entered the conversation.

  “They were never after the scroll.”

  Sammy Rizzo stepped under the trellis. Today Rizzo had shed his characteristic Hawaiian shirt for a stark black suit tailored to his four-foot frame. Sammy’s grief—honed by a desired romance that would now be forever unrealized—bled from his eyes

  He walked up beside Annie, took her hand in his, and looked into her face. “We were wrong,” Rizzo said. “They wanted what the scroll, the mezuzah, pointed to. And it wasn’t the Temple or the Tent. The guys who got me out of the monastery—the Temple Guard guys—they told me what this is all about. They showed me. I think it’s why so many have died. Why so many more may die.”

  Rizzo stroked Annie Bohannon’s hand, his eyes on her fingers. “You know, Kallie was so excited about this treasure hunt of ours, she was willing to sacrifice anything to be a part of it.”

  Annie knelt down on the flagstones and looked directly into his face. “I’m sorry, Sam. It’s okay—”

  “No! It isn’t over. What they’re after, they’ll never stop until they find it or they kill us all.”

  Annie reached out her right hand and placed it on Rizzo’s shoulder. “Then you and I will stop them, Sammy. You and me, Tom, and Joe, if that’s what it takes. God knows I’d rather go home and be normal. But we can’t live the rest of our lives like this, running in fear from these killers. And we can’t rely on the authorities to keep us safe. Can we, Sam?” She glanced at Reynolds who simply looked down at his polished shoes. “The Prophet’s Guard is ruthless and relentless. Richard wasn’t safe. Kallie wasn’t safe. They even went after Caitlin.”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head.

  “You know, I almost forgot this.” Annie turned her head to look at Tom. “If God’s hand is in this—and I believe that with all my heart—then he’s called us to be in this to the end.” There was no rebuke in Annie’s words, only resignation. She turned her attention back to Rizzo. “No matter what it is that the Prophet’s Guard wants.”

  Rizzo took a deep breath, holding eye contact with Annie. “They want to control the world,” he said. “And they think they can use God’s power to do that. That’s what they’re after.”

  “I don’t understand,”
said Dierdre Rodriguez. “What do you mean, use God’s power?”

  Rizzo turned his head to face her. “They’re looking for a weapon,” he said.

  “That is what we suspect.” From the raised section of the patio, where he’d been in deliberations with the rabbi, McDonough now joined them, carrying a large sheet of paper.

  “I traced these images,” said McDonough, “from the cover of a sarcophagus in what I believe is Jeremiah’s tomb.” On the sheet of paper were traced two large, angelic beings, their wings upraised, flaming swords held aloft in their hands. Behind the angels stood a huge tree. Below the angels and the tree was a shepherd’s staff.

  “We believe they are looking for this.” McDonough pointed to the staff. “The most powerful weapon in the history of man … And I think I know where we need to look: in the place where man’s history began.”

  In the ensuing silence, Annie could hear the wings of an insect humming in the garden. From inside the house came the voices of Rabbi Fineman’s other guests as they made their farewells.

  A ringing cell phone shattered the stillness.

  She looked to her right, where Reynolds was digging a phone out of his hip pocket.

  “I must admit you’ve piqued my interest to hear more about the greatest weapon in the history of man, but”—he raised the still-ringing smartphone—“this is one call I’ve got to take. Don’t get into the good stuff until I come back, okay?”

  Reynolds took two steps out from under the arbor and stopped, his back to the group in the shade. The conversation was brief. Reynolds took one more step away from the group, then straightened up and stuck the phone back in his pocket. Hands on his hips, he stood motionless in the sun for a moment and then turned back to the shelter of the arbor.

  “I’m sorry. I think I need to hear this story, but I’ve got to go,” said Reynolds. He looked at Annie, but his eyes were distant. “Where will you be tomorrow?”

  “Kallie’s apartment, probably,” she said.

  “Good. I’ll see you there … early.” Reynolds glanced around the group. “And you had better start packing. It’s time to leave.”

  Annie’s inner cauldron began to bubble; but before she could object, Reynolds had done an about-face and was out of the garden.

  “Good luck with that.” Rizzo took off his jacket and draped it over the back of a chair. Was it defiance or resolve that creased Sammy’s face? “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “This thing is still not over.”

  Bohannon rubbed his temples and snorted. “Maybe it’s not over for you, but I’ve just about had enough.” His words dripped with the poison of regret.

  Annie walked over to where Tom was sitting and put her hand on his shoulder. “I think we need to listen.” Her voice was firm, but her words were a plea. “We at least need to listen.”

  Rabbi Fineman stepped into the midst of the group, steadying the yarmulke that covered the thinning hair swept back over his head. “Let’s go inside,” he said, glancing in Annie’s direction. “Get out of the heat. I think it best that we all get a bit more comfortable. This is going to be a long story.”

  Fineman’s wife was in the kitchen, washing dishes. The rest of the house was empty, the rabbi’s guests having departed one by one in his absence. The team gathered in his small parlor, a well-worn air conditioner trying valiantly to defeat the afternoon heat. Bohannon paced in the confined space.

  “You’re telling me that we never understood what this was all about, not even from the beginning?” After all they had discovered and endured over the last few months, after all their amazing and awful experiences, Tom Bohannon hadn’t expected to be surprised by anything ever again.

  But now he was stunned by what he heard from his colleagues.

  “I do not believe it was possible for us to understand,” said Professor Brandon McDonough. He still held the large piece of tracing paper in front of him. “We did not have the full story … probably still don’t have the full story. But now that we have more of the pieces, well, I’d say we’re moving closer to the truth.”

  “So why don’t one of you,” said Bohannon, sweeping a hand in the general direction of the rabbi, McDonough, and Rizzo, “tell us what’s going on? You three seem to possess some information that the rest of us haven’t been able to figure out.” Bohannon threw himself into a soft, upholstered chair but then perched on the edge as if waiting to be launched.

  “Well, Tom, you have to understand that for more than a thousand years, only a handful of people have understood the true story behind the mezuzah and the scroll.” Rabbi Fineman sat on the sofa opposite Bohannon, his hands entwined, his face a roadmap of wrinkled concern. “You can’t blame yourself for not seeing the truth—as if that would have made any difference in the things that have happened.”

  “You and McDonough figured it out.” Bohannon flung the words into the crowded parlor as an indictment. “I should have seen it. I should have figured it out. Maybe then … maybe then …”

  “Maybe what?” Carrying a plate of sandwiches, Annie walked in from greeting Mrs. Fineman in the kitchen and sat on the arm of the upholstered chair. She put her arm around her husband’s shoulders, but her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “And maybe then Doc wouldn’t be dead? Maybe Kallie would still be alive?”

  Self-pity rode into Tom’s heart on the back of Annie’s words, slicing deep into his confidence. He was the leader. It was his fault.

  Twice over the last three months, Bohannon had been torn from his position as executive director of the Bowery Mission in New York City and thrown into a maelstrom of geopolitical crisis and intrigue in the Middle East. The first time, his unlikely team of archaeologists and amateur adventurers had thrust themselves into dangerous and uncharted waters to chase down a secret message decoded from an ancient scroll. Their young friend and colleague Winthrop Larsen was massacred by a Prophet’s Guard car bomb in New York City, and the rest of them had nearly died in the caverns underneath Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. The second time, Bohannon and his team were relentlessly recruited by the president of the United States to pursue any additional clues on the ancient scroll or the mezuzah that carried it.

  While the inscrutable brass mezuzah finally did reveal a second secret that led to the discovery of the biblical Tent of Meeting in a desert cave along Scorpion Pass in the Negev, the cost of the adventure had been devastating.

  Dr. Richard Johnson, former chair of the Antiquities College at Columbia University, was murdered by the Prophet’s Guard in a fourth-century monastery in the Red Sea desert of Egypt, where Sammy Rizzo narrowly escaped with his life; Kallie Nolan and Annie Bohannon were kidnapped in Jerusalem by the same group of Muslim fanatics; Tom and Sammy were part of a headlong race by Israeli soldiers who intercepted the fleeing kidnappers, but not in time to save Kallie Nolan’s life; Joe Rodriguez, shackled as a prisoner after unearthing the Tent of Meeting, watched in horror as Muslim fighters massacred a troop of Israeli soldiers on top of Temple Mount, then desecrated and torched the ancient Tent, after which the entire Mount platform was destroyed once again—this time by a pillar of fire.

  And that was just the personal cost.

  An improbable peace treaty between Israel and its Arab neighbors had been shattered as deeply as the Temple Mount; tension between Israel and Islam had risen to epic proportions; the Muslim Brotherhood was pursuing and consolidating power throughout the Middle East; the Israeli government of Prime Minister Eliazar Baruk was crumbling at just the time Israel was desperate for capable, moderate leadership; and an ultimate conflict over control of the Temple Mount appeared to be inevitable.

  Now, Bohannon was being told that his quest to decode the sacred scroll and unlock the mysteries of the brass mezuzah—which led to the discovery of an eleventh-century Jewish Temple constructed under the Temple Mount and, later, the unearthing of the original Tent of Meeting—was not the objective of the relentless, murderous pursuit of the Prophet’s Guard.

  Tom’s eyes flashed
with anger as he looked up at his wife. “And maybe Jerusalem wouldn’t have been devastated by an earthquake and thousands killed. Maybe …” He shook his head and looked around the room.

  McDonough and Fineman sat alongside each other on the sofa, as mismatched a pair as one could imagine. Dr. Brandon McDonough, provost of Trinity College in Dublin, was round and portly—stereotypically Irish—while Rabbi Ronald Fineman, a messianic rabbi from New York City who had befriended Bohannon and his team in Jerusalem, was long and thin. Joe Rodriguez left his wife, Deirdre, on an inhospitable futon and forced his six-four body into a sitting position next to Rizzo on the floor. Rodriguez was speaking softly into Rizzo’s ear while Sammy, his eyes downcast, absently folded and unfolded a piece of paper.

  Bohannon brought his attention back to the rabbi on the sofa. “Maybe I haven’t had a clue about the ultimate meaning of what we’ve found, and what we’ve experienced. But I do know it’s important. And I suppose I’m not surprised there’s more to come. So why don’t you—all of you—tell us what you know. Then maybe we’ll have some idea of what to do next.”

  Fineman looked left and right, his goatee bobbing on the end of his chin, sighed, and unfolded his hands as if opening a book.

  “Three pieces are woven together,” he said. “You know the first two, the mezuzah and the scroll—one ancient code after another concealing secrets as old as the Bible. But there is a third piece to this labyrinthine puzzle, a piece that leads to the weapon, a piece that burst into my consciousness just this afternoon. Let’s start with the book. You need to know about the book, and then we can move on.”

  Bohannon was puzzled. First there was a weapon. Now there was a book. “What book?”